Tag: underdark

A slow month on the site, blame it on the glimpse of summer and live music. Here’s a massive haul of new tracks – there’s a lot of omissions and some here deserve longer write-ups, but keeping up with such a hefty batch of releases is no easy task.

In the last few years there’s been something of a doom boom in the UK, and while the quality hasn’t matched the quantity across the board, there’s still a lot of innovators pushing open some breathing space by putting out heavy tunes that make your head feel like it’s in a giant garlic crusher. Belfast’s Slomatics are definitely one of those aforementioned experts in sadistic tone warfare, and their fifth LP, Future Echo Returns, is a long They Live style brawl of volcanic riffs and repeated decreases in tempo. The grand finale ‘Into The Eternal’ is a must if you were disappointed by Pallbearer’s recent cover of Type O Negative. Also out on the same label (Black Bow) are Tides Of Sulfur, who have a cadaverous death metal take on sludge that goes for the graveyard groove of Coffins, the indecent depth of Warhorse and Cianide, and the journeying inventiveness of Slabdragger, punctuated with inconsiderately heavy doom beatdowns.

Skinny Girl Diet have their new LP Heavy Flow coming out soon, and the tracks so far are confrontational, noise-drenched grunge future classics – ‘Yeti’ beats at least 50% of Nirvana classics at their own game, but they’re definitely a punk band and crucial for fans of Action Swingers and fellow Londoners Comanechi (RIP).

There’s another month or so until the remainder of On Strange Loops touches down, but stupidly advanced extreme metallers Mithras have two tracks out ahead of its release, ‘Between Scylla and Charybdis‘ and ‘The Statue On The Island‘. As before, their infuriatingly vivid technicality and huge, awe-inspiring atmospherics make Morbid Angel look like amateurs, and between his expertise in astrophysics and total mastery of multiple instruments, you wonder if Leon Macey is of this earth at all…?

You definitely don’t have to be freakishly gifted to make savage noise though, after all, we’re Only Human. This new Reagent Records band from Yorkshire have already been compared to YDI a couple of times, a fair comparison given they deal in blurry, cyclical, nightmare hardcore punk on their demo, though there’s also slobbering The Accused style yelling and hints of the Stupids and Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers. Also digging up an ancient USHC sound and from Leeds or thereabouts are Whipping Post, and their first demo Taste The Whipis some seriously addled crawling fuzz hardcore that pretty much picks up off where Mob Rules left off, making miserabler improvements on later Black Flag and bands like Nomos – the track ‘Pull The Cord’ especially is a heaving sleepwalk stomp.

Not done yet… Also from the locality and leaning towards a classic US sound are Natterers, whose debut demo is made up of upbeat rock’n’roll indebted instrumentation (the kind that Regulations and Adolescents both were so good at utilising in their songwriting) and dominated by loud unabashed vocals.

London’s Dym might rub up hardened heavy fans the wrong way, but the dreamy, queasy, mesmeric melodies that lull, lurch and snap throughout their dead sick of trying EP are a welcoming mix of Hum, Mahumodo and mid 90s Dischord emo, all very introspective and art school – not that there’s anything wrong with that, and if you’re after more contemplative matter in the screamo vein, Nottingham’s Underdark present a very intricate, refined version of black metal on their first, Mourning Cloak. The slick post-rock production bolsters their pretty compositions immeasurably as they ascend towards strained emotional climaxes, but for the most part they knuckle down with swaying, negative riffs and intermittent blasts, placing themselves along established BM expanders like Wolves In The Throne Room and (inevitably!) Deafhaven.